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So far, so good: but what of the passage in the Philebus taken
to imply that the other souls are parts of the All-Soul?
The statement there made does not bear the meaning read into it;
it expresses only, what the author was then concerned with, that
the heavens are ensouled- a teaching which he maintains in the
observation that it is preposterous to make the heavens soulless
when we, who contain a part of the body of the All, have a soul;
how, he asks, could there be soul in the part and none in the
total.
He makes his teaching quite clear in the Timaeus, where he shows
us the other souls brought into existence after the All-Soul, but
compounded from the same mixing bowl"; secondary and tertiary are
duly marked off from the primal but every form of soul is
presented as being of identical ideal-nature with the All-Soul.
As for saying of the Phaedrus. "All that is soul cares for all
that is soulless," this simply tells us that the corporeal kind
cannot be controlled- fashioned, set in place or brought into
being- by anything but the Soul. And we cannot think that there
is one soul whose nature includes this power and another without
it. "The perfect soul, that of the All," we read, "going its
lofty journey, operates upon the kosmos not by sinking into it,
but, as it were, by brooding over it"; and "every perfect soul
exercises this governance"; he distinguishes the other, the soul
in this sphere as "the soul when its wing is broken."
As for our souls being entrained in the kosmic circuit, and
taking character and condition thence; this is no indication that
they are parts: soul-nature may very well take some tincture from
even the qualities of place, from water and from air; residence
in this city or in that, and the varying make-up of the body may
have their influence [upon our human souls which, yet, are no
parts of place or of body].
We have always admitted that as members of the universe we take
over something from the All-Soul; we do not deny the influence of
the Kosmic Circuit; but against all this we oppose another soul
in us [the Intellectual as distinguished from the merely
vitalizing] proven to be distinct by that power of opposition.
As for our being begotten children of the kosmos, we answer that
in motherhood the entrant soul is distinct, is not the mother's.
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